April 29, 2007 – Click on image for higher resolution version.
I set up the hummingbird feeders on Thursday, and it took approximately 20 minutes for the first hummingbird to visit. However, it wasn’t until yesterday that business was brisk enough that I started seeing tiny aerial dog-fights as one hummingbird would chase away another.
Tuesday morning, about 8:15, we lost power due to a severe spring snow storm. Without electricity, our only working appliance was the gas range. We have a five gallon cooler that we keep filled with reasonably fresh water year round, so we had water we could heat and give to the dogs. The temperatures never fell significantly below freezing, so we didn’t have to worry about the pipes freezing. However, I was very happy at 10:10 pm last night when the bedside light woke me and I heard the hot water heater and furnace start. I got up for a while and puttered around, starting the dish washer, turning off lights and heating rice packs to warm the bed. I was practically purring to have electrical power after 36 hours without it.
Mountain View Electrical Coop generally does a great job on restoring power after storms. In our fifteen years in this neighborhood, this is the first outage that lasted more than four to six hours. I am just glad we don’t live near Calhan, an area to the east of us. I saw a report that they lost 200 utility poles, and may not get their power back until Saturday.
Yesterday, I upgraded my Ubuntu Linux distribution using the instructions at Upgrading your existing Ubuntu installation. It took quite a while, since the servers were apparently getting hammered, but I now have an up-to-date installation on my AMD 64 box.